Tatterdemalion Tuesday

tatterdemalion ~ tattered; ragged; scarecrow-like

Seeing as the hubby’s unexpected brush with death put the kybosh on the cruise we were going to take for our 40th anniversary, we decided to treat ourselves to a holiday weekend in good old Toronto. And yes, I know this post is a day late, but I have an excellent excuse. I wasn’t home to write it (and it never occurred to me to write it ahead of time).

To start this off right, I’d like to share a few observations and tips I made on our time away:

1. Make a list of stuff to take, including incidentals like hair brushes and deodorant. Check off each item as it’s packed and do not trust your husband to pack such things for you even though he is in charge of packing stuff from the bathroom.
2. Summer is hot. Summer in the city is stupidly hot.
3. Shoes/sandals that are fine for walking around the house or when you’re shopping are not necessarily good for walking miles and miles in unrelenting heat.
4. If you’re going on a site-seeing boat tour with the idea of taking lots of pictures, check out the boat before you pay for your ticket to make sure it doesn’t have windows that will cause reflections to muck up your pictures.
5. VIP Cineplexes are twice the price of a regular one and really not worth it.
6. Summer is not the most ideal time to visit a series of greenhouses in the center of the city. In fact, it’s a really, really stupid idea. Don’t do it.

All that being said, we still had a pretty good time. Our hotel was right on the waterfront so we just parked and walked to pretty much everywhere we wanted to go, like the Eaton’s Centre:

We actually went there a few times and got lost in there twice. I swear it’s built on a magical vortex of some kind that gives it the power to move stores and floors and exits.

For such a large city, Toronto is surprisingly clean. And just to pretty it up even more, there are murals in many unexpected places. Street art put to good use. This particular one was in the alley beside Massey Hall.

We saw it as we were leaving Fran’s after dinner our first night there. Fran’s is a somewhat famous diner that’s open 24/7. Its claim to fame is the invention of the original banquet burger by owner Fran Deck. Another famous place we ate was The Old Spaghetti Factory, which is housed in a building that at one time was a Blacksmith shop. It’s full of atmosphere and antiques and the food is fabulous.

As well as a lot of shopping and walking, we managed to squeeze in time to see the newest Jurassic World movie. It took four escalators to get up to the Cineplex where it was playing, and then another two to get up to the actual theatre where the movie was showing.

We also took a one hour boat tour of the Toronto Islands, and visited the Allan Gardens Conservatory. Allan Gardens is over 100 years old and covers over 16,000 square feet. The greenhouses contain tropical plants from all over the world and one of the greenhouses is nothing but cacti. And it is NOT a place to be visited on one of the hottest days of the summer. I now know how it feels to be sweating so much it drips into your eyes.

I do have a great many pictures from both the islands and the greenhouses, but they’re all on my camera and it’s going to be a while before I get those pictures downloaded. I did, however, manage a phone picture of our final excursion, the Royal Ontario Museum.

There was a lot to see, but we managed to see pretty much all of it – three floors of permanent exhibits as well as the special spider exhibit in the basement. I probably took close to a thousand pictures, but again, they’re mostly all on the camera not my phone. I did, however, get this picture of Yanluo, the King of Hell (Ming Dynasty):

Weighing the fun we had against the heat, the sore feet, and the leg cramps, I’d say all in all it was a great way to spend our anniversary weekend.

Happy Anniversary to us!

Mucopurulent Monday

mucopurulent ~ of mucus and pus

It’s the 24th of May
The queen’s birthday
And if we don’t get a holiday
We’ll all run away!

Yes, I know it’s actually the 21st of May, but that’s the way the rhyme goes. :-P

It’s the first official long weekend of the summer season for us here in Canada, the weekend where cottages are opened and gardens are planted. The barbeques are being brushed off as I type. When I was a kid it was also the time for major fireworks displays, but although some people do still set them off now, the big fireworks holiday is Canada Day.

I got a jump start on the weekend by starting my planting during the week. Wednesday the grandbaby and I went shopping for plants for the small square garden at the front of the house. Of course by the time we got them home there wasn’t enough time to plant them that day, so the next day I went ahead and bought the rest of my bedding plants to have ready for Friday.

Friday was a little cooler, but we filled the square garden and the long narrow garden along the front:

But while the front is looking pretty good, the back is another story. This is the pond garden:

We were already planning to redo this garden, but we were hoping to save at least some of the plants. It needs the saw dust removed (obviously), a retaining wall built at the back, and the entire garden will be more than doubled in size. We want to get a properly formed shell for the pond itself, one deep enough that maybe we can have fish. If we can get it to the point where it’s ready for plants by the end of the summer I think it’ll be a job well done. We can worry about the actual plants next summer.

Another project for the back yard was going to be putting in a couple of raised vegetable beds. This won’t be a particularly difficult project, but it will be a little time consuming so it’s been put off until later in the summer. Once again, if we can have them ready for planting by the end of the summer, then in the spring all I’ll have to do is pick out my seeds.

Speaking of vegetables though, remember the tomato seeds the grandbaby and her grapy planted?

Aren’t they cute? Yes, well, a funny thing happens when you leave plants in the sun and keep watering them. They tend to grow. I thinned them out once, but now they need bigger pots (maybe even later today). I’m beginning to suspect they’re not going to be cherry tomatoes as I’d first hoped, but some much bigger kind.

So… How’s your garden coming?

Metachrosis Monday

metachrosis ~ ability of animals to change colour

Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow Canadians and Happy Columbus Day to my American friends.

Despite the fact that today is the actual holiday, like most people we had our big, family dinner yesterday. And the thing I’d like to know is, if I was just a contributor and not the host, how come my fridge is stuffed with leftovers? Mostly stuffing and veggies and fruit. The pie I brought that didn’t even get cut into went into the freezer for when my sisters stop in for a visit in a couple of weeks.

I was totally a bad diabetic too - I indulged in a piece of the daughter’s pecan pie for desert. Man can that girl bake a mean pie! And they’re so pretty too! I wish I could take credit for teaching her that skill, but though I’ll make a pie from scratch I don’t put nearly as much effort into it as she does.

So how are you spending your holiday weekend?

I looked at the three days I had coming and thought it would be the perfect time to at least start moving my office across the hall. Man, I don't know what I was thinking!

Oh, come on. Did you really expect it to be as easy as that?

Day one started with a trip to the city of Peterborough, north of us. And not just there, but to the north side of the city where the Fabricland is. The idea was to pick up the stuff I needed to make the grandbaby’s bunny costume for Halloween. To make a long story short, the fake fur was way too expensive, I wasn’t happy with the textured arctic fleece I ended up with, and they didn’t have a pattern in her size. But there was a giant thrift store in the same plaza where I scored an already made tiger costume in her size. The trick will be convincing her she wants to be a tiger instead of a bunny.

Two more stops in Peterborough, four more stops before home. I started out at 9:30 a.m. and didn’t get back until after 3 p.m. It was crazy out there, both the stores and the traffic. I was fried when I got back home and I’m not ashamed to admit that all I managed to do with the office was cleaning up and refurbishing the kitty litter area, and emptying the white bookcase we want out of there (it was already half empty).

Day two was spent re-organizing closets. Yeah, I know it seems kind of counter productive, but it had to be done. I got rid of a bunch of stuff and have a bunch of stuff set aside to donate. Now my arts and crafts are nicely organized in the workroom closet with room to spare for file storage, and the big closet in the hallway has all my sewing and yarn supplies, maybe not as nicely organized, but definitely easier to get at. And as a bonus there was room in a corner of it for my mops and broom so they don’t fall on me every time I open the linen closet.

Today I get to actually start working on the Great Office Shuffle. How far I’m able to get is anyone’s guess.

Malacoid Monday

malacoid ~ made of a soft or fleshy substance

Wow, hard to believe it’s September already. Just last week it still seemed so far away, but here we are, Labour Day weekend. The last long weekend of summer.

Not that we really had much summer this year. It was mostly wet. Sometimes it was cool and wet, sometimes it was hot and wet - and there were only a handful of days that it was hot enough to complain about. While I could have lived without the excessive rain over the summer, the cooler temperatures were quite nice.

As has been my tradition for most of my adult life, the end of summer wouldn’t be complete without a trip to the Canadian National Exhibition. Or as most people call it, The Ex. When the daughter was little it was our mommy/daughter thing - the highlight of the summer.

I tried to take a few pictures on the way there of traffic volume and the drive along Lakeshore Blvd which is like driving through a tunnel with all the roads criss-crossing above it, but my phone updated the day before we went and my settings got all messed up. By the time I got it working again we were already at the Princess Gates.

Actually, considering it was the Friday of the holiday weekend, traffic wasn’t too bad at all. And going home the traffic was even lighter - almost unheard of when driving in Toronto. After wandering around the main building for a bit, we decided to get something to eat, and as we made our way across the top edge of the midway, who should we run into but my sister and her family. They’d already eaten so we made plans to hook up for supper (although they tired out quicker than us so by that time they'd packed it in to head for home).

Some of the sights we enjoyed were an amazing sand sculpture exhibit:

If you’re on my Facebook page there are more pictures of the sand sculptures. And there was Rock Valley:

It’s amazing watching the artist stack those rocks with such precision. Unfortunately this was his last year for it. And we got to see the impressive Quilt of Belonging:

This quilt was so big I couldn’t quite fit it all in one picture. It’s 10 ½ feet high and 120 feet long, made up of 263 quilt blocks. It was designed to portray the cultural legacy of Canada’s First Peoples, and it does so in an amazing way. If you’d like to learn more about it, go HERE .

And my personal tradition when going to the CNE is to buy one completely frivolous item. Past purchases include embroidered kimonos, a silk skirt, a witch ball, a didgeridoo, a carved wooden chest, and a large rain stick. This year’s purchase just might top them all, a plasma light dragon:

By the time supper time rolled around we’d pretty much seen everything there was to see. Sadly, the CNE just isn’t what it used to be. The International Marketplace has shrunk down so that it fits into the same building as the domestic market, along with the outlet shopping. You used to be able to walk across the avenue in the grounds to the Automotive building to see the cars on display and A Taste of Country, but that’s no longer there. And they no longer have the horse show in the indoor arena - the daughter and I loved to get our food and sit to watch the horses.

Being a week day the crowds weren’t bad, but they were bad enough, and people were rude! And the noise was pretty bad too - it was almost impossible to carry on a conversation outside of the buildings. To be honest, I don’t know how eager I am to go again, unless it’s with the grandbaby.

Maybe I’m just getting old. :-D

Mandarism Monday

mandarism ~ government with a large bureaucracy

If last week was rather dull, cold and damp, hot and damp, and depressing and damp, the weekend more than made up for it.

First of all ... remember all that flooding we had? Well in an effort to save the beach and/or the tourist season which traditionally kicks off on the Canada Day weekend, the Town of Cobourg had truck loads of sand brought in and dumped on what was left of our beach. After the heavy equipment finished spreading all that sand, we had a partial beach, at least down to the life guard towers.

Then it rained again

This is what the “beach” looked like on June 30 (Friday):

Well, that was certainly worth it, wasn’t it?

Despite the lack of beach, the weather was actually better than predicted. Friday was wet and miserable, but Saturday, which was supposed to be filled with thunderstorms and rain, was pretty hot and humid. Frankly I’d rather have a good honest rain than high humidity, but the sky was clear enough for the fireworks to celebrate Canada Day, and the water had actually receded enough that we could sit on the beach to watch them.

But even better than the fireworks was something we stumbled across on the way home. We passed a small group of people carrying large paper lanterns and torches, headed to a more secluded area of the beach. Once on the shore they fired up the flame sources inside the lanterns and once they were buoyant set them free to drift away.

That’s not an actual picture of what we saw, that’s just to give you an idea. But as awesome as it was to watch, I have to admit we had to wonder about the wisdom of letting the lanterns loose from this narrow stretch of beach. Between the tall trees and the houses so close to the shore, I think it was just dumb luck that nothing else caught fire.

I don’t usually check out the Waterfront Festival that’s held over the holiday weekend, but I did this year. The dampness didn’t seem to discourage attendance, it was pretty crowded when we were down there. And I don’t think the vendors had too much to complain about, business must have been good - even I bought something.

It’s my new writing bag. Big enough to hold note books, pens, and even my Alphasmart Neo. It’s from Guatemala and I was told it was made from material repurposed from native dresses. The embroidery is from the top part of the dress, the rest from the skirt. I’m not sure how much of the sales pitch I believe, but I’m going to enjoy using it.

Belated Happy Canada Day to my fellow Canadians, and an early Happy Fourth of July to my American friends. I’ll have to remember to dig out my Independence Day movies to watch on Tuesday in your honour. :-D